#trickrope

Roping is a versatile art, if you consider it an art at all. It could be thought of as many different things depending on your approach: a practical skill, a hobby, a performance, a sport, a dance, or even acrobatics. I have not myself taken much of an acrobatic approach to it and I think most people don’t, but if I were more of a gymnast myself, I should like to. Roping has its roots in labor, a tool for the rancher to get the job done. From there it found its way to the stage, whether rodeo, vaudeville, or circus. In the early days of American roping, after being passed to the cowboys by the Mexican charros, there was strong representation on all three of those stages with some of the same performers making appearances across the board. Western culture is romanticized with the image of the rugged free spirit cowboy on the ranch but we shouldn’t ignore the parallel path that trick roping has taken as those early pioneers developed it into a performance art by the likes of Will Rogers who after being influenced by Vicente Oropeza’s rope demonstration in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show went on to hone his own trick rope act in New York City and on the Vaudeville circuit. 

I see trick roping pop up in some unexpected places and by those who never set foot on a ranch in the Old West, and I’m not complaining about it either. I myself, although from a town with rich Southwest and Mexican culture, was essentially a city kid as I grew up in Tucson Arizona but I have the belief that any who love and embrace the rope can be adopted in as true and authentic rope bearers no matter how physically far removed from the ranch you are. This is how the tradition can stay alive, grow, and thrive.

Many have taken the rope to the circus ring, England born Vince Bruce was one of the greatest to do so. Much of his act retained a western feel, but his unicycle mounted Texas Skip was a fusion of trick roping with a more standard circus technique that he performed both in the big top and in the rodeo arena as seen in this video at the 1 minute mark. 

Video: Vince Bruce performing the trick rope skip on a unicycle.

This isn’t exactly acrobatics but it’s a representation of the mixing of western arts with circus skills. I don’t know if he was the first to do this trick, I have seen it one other time by a Chinese circus performer but I have no idea if they got the idea from watching Vince or not. That point requires some investigation, which I intend to do. 

A recent video I found shows another fusion of circus arts and roping, this example is a mix of tumbling gymnastics and roping, not paying much homage to western culture stylistically but the performers are spinning ropes while performing quite impressive acrobatic feats. It’s a very stunning performance, I image that these performers started out as gymnasts foremost and then added trick roping to that, instead of the other way around. It gives you a sense that there is a lot more that can be done with a rope. They do various flips while spinning a wedding ring, some backward rolls, and a very impressive one handed back handspring run also with a wedding ring. Please view the performance yourself, and I’ll remind you that youtube has a setting to slow down the video which is helpful to see how they flip through the rope like that.  

Video: Nanjing Troupe, China - Lazo (Icarian Games with Lasso)

They are using rather long ropes, probably cotton, with swivels on the handles as it appears to me. I only know what is included in the title and description of the video, and this was from an October 2018 performance in Italy. I hadn’t seen this type of acrobatic work with trick roping before this, so I thought it might be a rather new phenomenon, but just last week I found a video that Chris McDaniel posted of some cowboy style acrobatics from an old movie clip that had some similarities. This one has more classic tricks but also a cartwheel and a running front flip into a wedding ring. Very cool. I wish I could tell you what movie this is, and who the ropers are but that’s another research project for me apparently (it could be Cuba Crutchfield 1891-1969, known for acrobatic roping, he lived in Nevada).

Video: Acrobatic Trick Roping in an unknown old western movie (Nevada?)

A more popular (although not very widely used) trick I’ve seen a few contemporary ropers do that goes in this direction is the headfirst jump into the wedding ring, or handstand jump. I’m not sure what it’s called but it’s a trick where you spin a flat loop and dive down into it using your non spinning hand to brace yourself and your feet kick up over your head. The rope vaults up and over your body as your feet come back down. How I’ve seen it, the rope goes up and over the body and is directly lifted off back to a flat loop. You can see Loop Rawlins do this in his routines, including in this 2014 AGT performance at the two minute mark. It’s quite a crowd pleaser, and rightly so.

Video: Loop Rawlins performs an acrobatic headfirst jump into the rope

I really enjoy this kind of blending of trick roping with other skills and I hope to see more of it in the future, I believe we will. I myself am working on some ideas that I will share when the time comes.

UPDATE 11 Mar 2019

I must add this in here because I saw a roping video over the weekend that was wonderful and had some very fresh elements; it is the work of a roper named Shena Tschofen. She has great dance elements and some very flexible body moves mixed in, this is a look at the frontier of roping performance. “Please Go Around”

Figure1: Liftoff, 3 steps in cartoon form

When you've been around the block a few times, you don't need to know Newton's laws to understand how stuff works. If you stop spinning the rope it will fall to the floor OK? That was enough to get me by for a while, our brains are really good at learning a lot of things without really needing to know the nitty gritty details. Try spinning faster, slower, pull it up when it's on the left, make a flick with your wrist and see what happens - whatever the motion may be that makes the rope dance how you want it to, you start to get the hang of it after enough trial and error. To be honest, knowing the nitty gritty can sometimes even get in the way or at least not really help you to learn a trick better or quicker anyway. But to contradict my own point, without giving you any equations and numbers I'll proceed to go into a light discussion on the ups and downs of the forces at play while spinning a rope. It can't hurt to think about, and it might just help a little.

If you want equations and numbers then you'll love this quite amazing scientific paper from the research of Brun, Ribe, Audoly - An introduction to the mechanics of the lasso. It's quite a doozie, and they only even analyze the flat loop! Expert roper Jesus Garcilazo makes a cameo appearance in the paper. Think of all the head exploding that would go on if they wrote a paper on the butterfly or body rolls or something tricky like that, but who would even put themselves through such analysis? You're better off picking up a rope and doing a few months of straight wood-shedding to develop some amazing new trick that couldn't be put into an equation even by all the world's supercomputers.

Another reference I must mention is Carey Bunks' The Lasso, A Rational Guide To Trick Roping. It's a long standing free online book which you have likely already come across, an extensive explanation and guide for learning many tricks with the rope, he also gives his take on the mechanics of it in a not-too-rigorous way and therefore it can probably be useful to a lot of people.

In my rebirth of roping, my second wind, I have found occasion where I dissect a subtle motion or rethink the speed at which I spin the rope during a particular section of a trick in order to get it more solid, or to increase the success rate of the trick (or to even get a first success). And with good results too, so I believe it does pay to take the effort to put a critical eye on your methods while still sticking to rough and ready trial and error technique to really learn the thing on the street. Go at the concepts with broad strokes and let your miracle brain work out the exact finesse behind the curtain of grey matter, that's my approach.

The loop always has this angular momentum which just means it's spinning in a circle, it will keep spinning in this behavior on its own for a short time but it's constantly being diminished by gravity and air resistance a little so it needs your hand to keep nudging it in the right direction. You can feel some tension where the rope is pulling back on you through the spoke, greater tension when the speed of the loop is faster. This tension is a good thing, it means that you can control where the rope goes next. If you slow down too much or pull on the rope in the wrong direction then you can feel this tension die and you no longer will be able to influence the rope, it will just fizzle out, close up, or go limp unless you make a larger motion in time to correct it and get the control back.

I'll give a crack at a layman's description of what keeps a spinning loop open: Looking down at a loop from above we have a spinning loop (spoke omitted).

Figure2: counterclockwise loop

Newton said something about an object in motion will just keep on goin' how it's been goin' unless you give it some contrary force. Well that means if it's moving it will go in a straight line unless something pushes it to turn it, speed it up, or slow it down. A loop is going in a circle so it's always turning, therefore there must always be some force maintained on the loop to keep it always turning around and around. I can't really understand all of that unless I imagine the loop not as one rope but as a bunch of little connected points. These points happen to be connected as a rope so they end up pulling and pushing each other along in a circle but if they were disconnected from each other let's imagine what they would do. Every point on that loop will want to just keep going straight, here's a diagram to show what would happen if these points were not connected and allowed to keep going straight.

Figure3: independent points on a spinning loop

They would spread out and make a bigger circle. This in essence is the force that keeps pushing the loop open, a centrifugal force as it may be called. Since the rope is all connected together it's not so easy for the loop to open up though. You should feel this pulling force as you spin the spoke and you exert a force pulling back against it to keep the loop going at a constant size.

Speed does matter, spin a faster loop and the outward pull is greater, you'll feel more tension pulling on your spoke hand and have to exert a little more force to keep that loop in place. If your spoke is allowed to freely slip through the honda then you should see changes in the size of your loop corresponding to how fast and abrupt you are spinning. The loop will increase in radius but at the expense of the spoke length. A growing loop eats up spoke so it must either raise up towards the hand as the spoke length decreases or you must feed it more rope if you have any extra bunched up in your other hand. Spinning speed is not a linear correlation to loop radius though, because the friction of the rope rubbing on the honda will make the loop less responsive to speed changes. So up to a certain point you can have small changes in acceleration and the loop will stay about the same.

I've bored you up to this point but now I'll give you something more interesting. I learned a trick as a kid which I could do good enough most of the time but my loop would sometimes close up and I'd have to spin like the dickens to get it to open up again. It was lifting off from a wedding ring to a flat loop in front of you. Follow the sequence in images below. 1. it starts with a wedding ring. 2. take it down to a single handshake. 3. pull it up from the handshake with a good upward tug. 4-5. pop it up directly above the head. 6-7. pull it out to the right side as it starts to come down. 8. *transition from spoke under loop to spoke above loop, pulling the spoke to the side of the loop while in transition. 9. loop comes to lower position and you continue spinning. 10. settled into flat loop.

Photo: The Liftoff Sequence, 10 steps

The transition at step 8 gave me problems stemming from the fact that the spinning hand must move from it's position in the middle of the circle and go outside the circumference of the loop for a bit before being able to move your spoke hand back to the center of the loop's circle when the loop is in the down position in front of you again. My problem was that I was tugging the rope to get it to move down but I wasn't tugging at the right time in the circular phase of the spin to keep the loop open and my rope would get to the floor as a closed up mess.

The upward and downward motion is one aspect of the trick but all the while you must keep the cyclical spinning motion going and not do any tugging on the rope at a time when your pull will cause the loop to close. Before I knew exactly how to correct myself  I thought about how the rope must move and about what might be causing the problem. I figured I was either flicking the rope to the side at the wrong time or not aggressively enough to keep the loop open. Most problems are usually a matter of timing or spinning speed. So I started experimenting with pulling down sooner/later and with different flicks of the arm and wrist at different times. I became much more aware of the cycle of the loop, meaning the position of the honda in relation to the loop's circle and after a bit of trial and error I had an awakening.

Photo:Samson Spot Cord #12 for trick roping, 18 feet with a thimble in the honda

For the curious, and I really hope there are a few out there, I will give details of the ropes I use, and how to configure for yourself a good spinning rope. These aren't the only kinds of ropes that are good for trick roping but some of the most popular. Ropers usually have multiple ropes because you need some variation to fine tune specific tricks, mostly by altering the length of the rope but you might also add some weight to it depending on your need. Someday I may branch out to try other ropes like nylon, maguey or other types of twisted rope but for now I use cotton braided rope, it is a true standard among trick ropers.

Samson Spot Sash Cord #12 - This is from what I can tell the most widely used rope for trick roping and it's been around for more than 100 years. You can spot it by its red spots, it's a white rope with a bit of red braided in, a cotton braid which is about 3/8 inch thick if you use #12, I've heard of some people using #10 which is a little smaller and lighter. You can get it in 1000 foot reels, 100 foot hanks, by the foot, or pre-fashioned as ready to spin trick ropes. The biggest and maybe only change in the rope over the years is in the core, it is most commonly found now with a nylon core covered in cotton braid but it was originally produced with cotton both as the core and outer braid. I haven't seen it in stores lately but you can easily order the standard nylon core rope from hardware retailers and you can also get the cotton core rope (which many ropers swear by) from Western Stage Props or Dubé Juggling Equipment. The cotton core will run you about twice the price of the nylon core, but it's still very cheap to get into roping compared to most other hobbies that aren't nearly as wholesome. Western Stage Props gives a little summary of Samson's heritage with trick roping, read it here for extra credit.

To start out I recommend a rope no less than 12 feet in length and more like 15 feet if you don't want to feel crowded in the wedding ring, that being said, I have a 12.5 foot rope that is one of my favorites. Children may be alright with a 10 foot rope. Ropes 18 feet and greater can start to get too big to manage for the flat loop and that's where most people start. There is a technique of gathering any extra length in your non-spinning hand, but it's best at first to not fuss with that, less to worry about.

A new rope will be stiff, which I don't much prefer, so I break in a rope by putting it through a wash cycle, let it dry and giving it a good stretch and twist a time or two. I've heard of different techniques for this, but I'll leave it to you to figure out what you want to do. If you give it a good wash it will help a lot, then just by spinning it you'll loosen it up over time. A broken in rope will fatten up a bit from the original 3/8 inch size because the braid will loosen and then it will have a nice limp feel.

Before you spin, you need to fix one end into a small eye, called a honda. This is done by just bending the last 3-4 inches of the rope back on itself and fixing it by sewing it together with strong thread or wire, or alternately just taping it down. Leave a big enough hole in the eye to run the other end of the rope through it and typically you want extra space so the rope can slide freely, however, a training wheels version can be made by taping the eye very tight around the other end so there isn't any extra room. This pinches it down so that it's not slipping around the whole time, all that slipping around can be hard for a beginner. I started this way, by taping the honda into a tight pinched eye. Some people tie it or sew it so the honda is fixed to where the spoke meets the loop but I don't think this is necessary, I've found just taping it so you have a tight eye in the honda is fine, you can still pull the rope through by hand to adjust the length and then you can easily remove the tape later when you graduate.

Photo: A tight honda fastened with tape at the end of a 15 foot rope

A rope that is fixed or tight at the honda is virtually useless for doing any real cowboy work because when you try to make a catch, the loop won't close up easily. I know we are talking about trick roping here, but I like to remember our origins, also you will find a fixed honda restrictive later as some routines are based around being able to change the size of your loop as you spin, and for that you need a loose honda. It doesn't hurt to try both ways, a piece of tape is easily applied or removed so please experiment.

Now you are ready to spin that rope! Just run the loose end of your rope through the eye of the honda and you've got your 3 necessary parts: a loop, a honda, and a spoke. While these are the only 3 necessary attributes that your rope must have, there is an optional element which you will probably come across eventually: the burner. A burner is an add on to the honda and they come in many varieties and materials; leather, plastic, metal. The burner is just material that covers the part of the honda that comes in contact with the rope as it runs through that eye. Burners have different purposes, sometimes it is to protect the rope from excessive wear at that friction point, sometimes it is to add extra friction and slow the rope down, and sometimes it is to decrease the friction and speed the rope up. People usually use speed burners for catch ropes and not for trick roping. Many trick ropers do use burners to slow the rope, that is to slow the slipping action that changes the length of spoke and loop.

Below is my 12.5 foot rope with a leather burner that I sewed on, I sewed it tightly and the wear has made it very smooth so it doesn't actually slow the rope noticeably. Some leather burners do slow ropes down by providing more friction but you can get a similar effect by taping it into a tighter eye. This rope also has 2 pennies taped into the honda, pennies are 2.5 grams each and nickels are 5 grams. Adding coins to your rope not only makes it more valuable but tames down a rope, or in other words keeps the loop from opening up so easily. If your loop rides up your spoke too much then some more weight on the honda should help, either that or calm down your spinning. A few pennies has a small effect on performance (and value), I'm still in the experimentation phase on this. How much weight you need will vary depending on the weight of the rope itself, how hard and fast you want to spin and how large a loop you want to target for. If you want to spin a large, stationary vertical loop (not alternating like the butterfly) you will need to add a good amount of weight.

Photo: honda with leather burner and weighted with 2 pennies

It is standard practice to add weight to the honda for large loop ropes and ropes for Texas Skip. Texas Skip usually requires 22-25 feet of rope and you won't be able to get 20+ feet of rope to hold a good vertical loop to skip through without adding an ounce or more to the honda, that's a lot more than a few pennies. The most common way to do this is to get a metal thimble which is very similar to a burner in that it is an insert into the honda, this time not for speeding up or slowing down a rope but to balance it. Based on the length and weight of your rope you need to get the right honda weight to find a good equilibrium point. You can get rope thimbles from hardware stores, marine supply stores, or specialized brass hondas at Western Stage Props.

I am just starting to experiment with these heavier hondas so I don't have any strong tips or conclusions yet, but I picked up a $2 thimble from Lowe's hardware store a few days ago and put it on an 18 foot rope as a sort of mid-weight rope shown below. It works, has a pretty different feel from light ropes but I'm getting the hang of it. I will probably add some more weight to it by wrapping some wire around it.

Photo: honda with metal thimble to add weight

I currently have 3 ropes: 1. 12.5 foot, 3/8 inch cotton braided, nylon core rope. This is my oldest rope, and it's not spot cord, it is of unknown manufacture purchased at a feed store around 1988. It is my most used rope for flat loop, wedding ring, and butterfly tricks. It may be a little on the small side for wedding ring but I find that it works for me and forces me to be accurate with my loop placement around my body. 2. 15 foot, #12 cotton core spot cord. A great all around rope that gives me a little more room than my first rope. 3. almost 18 foot, #12 cotton core spot cord for when I want something bigger. Heavier honda.

I stumbled on a nice display of trick roping in popular media recently. I didn't so much stumble on it but more like did a web search for something like "trick roping" and it was served to me. I first found an interview with actor Alden Ehrenreich who was promoting a movie called Hail Caesar! A Cohen brothers film from 2016. He was discussing training with horses, ropes, and guns for a role as an old time western movie star named Hobie. I searched out the clip of the roping scene and it packed everything from flat loop to Texas skip in less than a minute. It was impressive, and nice to see trick roping take a spotlight for a moment.

The second half of the sequence really started running away though and I had to watch it six times (probably more) trying to make sense of it. All the tricks were legitimate standards, impressive stuff that I wouldn't expect one could pick up in two months while doing all the other preparation an actor must be doing before a movie. The real kicker though was the transitions between tricks, they weren't quite like anything I had seen and I couldn't quite wrap my head around them. He goes into bouncing the loop over his head a few times, but it looked a little strange as he goes for that first lift. The more peculiar part was coming out of it he's spinning the loop counter clockwise which is standard, but somehow pulls off a merry go round clockwise around his body and hoists it up vertical into Texas skip with a nice big loop. I don't even think you can use the same rope for small horizontal loop tricks and large vertical loop skip and pull it off so nonchalantly.

Now, I'm not going to say all that is impossible,  just because I don't understand how a thing could be done doesn't mean it's impossible but  I knew for sure this guy was either a roping wizard or Hollywood has done what we all love it to do and fabricated a fancy little roping scene here. I set out to find out for sure which of my hypotheses were correct, knowing that it was probably the latter. I read through a good many interviews and articles which gave background to what was going on.

I found good evidence that Ehrenreich trained for six weeks with Cliff McLaughlin, son of famed stuntman Gene McLaughlin who was a big name in classic Hollywood westerns. In fact he says in an article on Front Row Features   "The rope twirling was real. I worked with a guy named Cliff McLaughlin"

So is that our answer then? Hmm, let's get a second opinion, it sounds like a vague answer that needs some clarification, pressing onward.

This piece where Robert Seigel of NPR  interviews Josh Brolin who was also in the movie is quite interesting, openly alluding to the possibility that the scene was doctored. I should mention there is apparently another roping scene in the movie which involves noodles instead of rope but I haven't seen that part yet.

SIEGEL: Alden Ehrenreich...

BROLIN: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...Learned to do rope tricks for this last.

BROLIN: Yeah, and with spaghetti.

SIEGEL: (Laughter) That's right.

BROLIN: So the great thing about now is we'll never know whether he really learned that, whether it was a stunt rope, whether it was a digital rope. You'll never know.

SIEGEL: Never know.

BROLIN: And you don't need to know. Why break the mystery?

I will concede that it is true we don't need to know if it was real or not, we as the general movie-going public who just want to be entertained and swept up into fantasy as a reprieve from the drugery of our lives. We as trick ropers on the other hand do have a professional responsibility to know if there really is a prodigy rope wizard out there among us. The fact that Brolin brought up digital alteration without any prompting from the interviewer is a little telling but we can't really read much into it either because he may not know where the line of special effects was drawn.

On Mashable Ehrenreich himself directly refers to "movie magic"

Interviewer: "The rope tricks. Too cool to be totally true, right?" Ehrenreich: [Laughs again] "I had to learn a lot of it! I had a trick-roping guy. But there’s a lot of movie magic there."

Uh huh, the truth comes out. Just one more reference from FXGuide that goes so far as to describe the extent and the method of how the effect was done. Digging into the article about three fourths of the way through it describes that Ehrenreich did indeed learn the ropes literally, he started out with a few tricks without any effects and then transitions into a sequence where he was only holding a short piece of rope going through the motions of the tricks but the full rope was added digitally. He was trained on the basics and how to move to make it believable. They did a good job, it's a nice moment but I admit I'm glad to find out it wasn't real, I wouldn't want someone picking these tricks up effortlessly and thereby shaming all the rest of us who have worked so hard to earn these the long way. It may be my pride talking but there could be a little harm here, as the effect was done very well and to most people it looks real. So there are probably a lot of people out there that think this actor did pull off all these tricks and if he - not a roping professional - could do it then the next time they see an actual roper doing it they will think it's not as big a deal as it really is. But I want to focus on the positive, and I remember that public perception it not the main motivating factor driving me to be a trick roper, so I shouldn't lose any sleep over it.